Saturday, July 04, 2015

I define poetic opportunity as the moment in which the
regular course of the world, that mechanism of objects and words, grinds to a
sudden halt before an abyss of meaning, which it jumps over so quickly that you
might not even think the ground had opened at your feet and you had almost
drowned on dry land. This brief, symbolic crack in the order of things is,
normally, normalized, shaken off, forgotten or explained. The idea that the
world is working behind our back – a figure of speech that doesn’t quite
logically work, as the world includes our back, brain and breath, but I will
let it go for now – can lead to ecstasy, paranoia or breakdown, but mostly it
just leads to irritation and a passing moodiness.

Sometimes it even leads to poetry. But not very often.

For instance – I’ve been mulling over some material
presented to me by Adam. We’ve made it a habit, Adam and I, to walk up the
street here in Montpellier, past the roadwork and, after a brief stop at the
boulanger to buy a croissant, all the way up to the old College of Medicine.
The portal to the College of Medicine is guarded on either side by two statues
of eminent members of the Montpellier school of physiognomy from the 18th
century. The statues are bronze, and look like they were created in the 19th
century. Certainly they are more than a century old. During the time the two
doctors – Lapeyronie and Barthez – have sat there, generations
of pigeons have shit on them. In consequence, their faces are marked by traces
of oxidation. Adam recognized those traces as tears, and decided that the
statues are crying. When Adam cries,
people around him say, calm down. So Adam’s response to these two statues –
which he likes, he sometimes asks me when we are going to see the statues – is to
tell them to calm down.

I surely should be able to make something out
of this scene – this pint sized Californian with the blond hair looking up at
the statues, each of which are around ten feet high, and telling them to calm
down.

But it is hot. The cicadas in the trees are
incessant. The mosquitos are a nuisance. I want a gin and tonic. With a lot of
ice. And the occasion escapes me.

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

One would need the heart of an economist not to find the ECB’s
dealings with Greece cruel and irrational beyond measure. And one would need
the eye of an anthropologist to see how this outburst of elite irrationality
connects up with other such outbursts that run in a series through Europe’s
history. The troika reminds me, in its infinite causuistry, its moral outrage,
and the endless punishments that it metes out, of the various commissions to
investigate witchcraft that darken the pages of the history of the sixteenth
and seventeenth century. One of the most famous was lead by Pierre de Lancre,
Montaigne’s relative – he married the granddaughter of Montaigne’s uncle and
the president of the parliament of Bordeaux, who in 1608 ventured with other
grave worthies into the land of Satan which, according to credible report, had
been conquering the women of Labourd in Southern France. The expedition was
accompanied, it was once thought, by a holocaust of thousands of burnings.
Historians now think that these moderates, these 17th century
centrists, did things the way centrists do: they only burned a few dozen women,
and then wrote laborious screeds justifying their actions. What distinguishes Lancre is that he was
justly proud of his relation to Montaigne and was a pure product of the
humanist culture of Southwest France. Montaigne’s own opinions on witchcraft
are, like all his opinions, an involved and dialogical affair, but he certainly
comes out against the persecution of witches on the ground that the witch
itself is a figure invented by the theorists of witchcraft: “C’est mettre ces
conjectures a bien haut pris que d’en faire cuire un homme tout vif.”

A phrase that should haunt Europe now, while we watch a
whole country being put to the stake in support of economic conjectures that
were first proposed before there was any grasp of the business cycle, and are
now being forced down the throats of entire populations because their elites
are either complicit or afraid to act.

Vox EU, which is usually a site devoted to the reactionary
maunderings of economists in thrall to neoliberalism, published an unusually
blistering analysis of the ECB’s usurpation of state power and its expulsion of
Greece from the European Union – which is, beneath the rhetoric, what is
happening here.Written by Charles Wyplosz, the heart of the article is in this to my mind
unanswerable graf:

Why did the ECB freeze
its Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to Greece? The ECB will undoubtedly
come up with all sorts of legal justifications. Whether true or not, this will
not change the outcome.

If the ECB is truly
legally bound to stop ELA, this means that the Eurozone architecture is deeply
flawed.

·If not, the ECB will
have made a political decision of historical importance.

Either way, this is a
disastrous step.

Whether it likes it or
not, every central bank is a lender of last resort to commercial banks.

·By not keeping the Greek
banking system afloat, the ECB is failing on a core responsibility.

Surely the EU will never be the same. Either the strong
European states – such as France - will reign in the ECB, or the EU will become
a shell – and the quicker that happens, given the superstitions of the elites running
Europe, the better.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.